“I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU”: TOMMY JOHN’S LAST MESSAGE TO THE YANKEES HITS DIFFERENTLY NOW

NEW YORK — Eight days ago, Tommy John was supposed to be part of another Yankees reunion.

He could not make it to Yankee Stadium.

His health would not allow it.

So John did the next best thing. He sent his words.

On Aug. 8, during the Yankees’ 78th Old Timers’ Day, a message from John was shared with the baseball community. He was at home in Florida, battling serious health problems, while generations of Yankees gathered again in the Bronx.

John understood what the moment represented.

And his message sounded unmistakably like a man taking inventory of an extraordinary life in baseball.

He thanked the Yankees organization and the Steinbrenner family for allowing him the opportunity to say goodbye.

He thanked his friends.

He thanked his former teammates.

He remembered Dr. Frank Jobe, the surgeon whose experimental reconstruction of John’s damaged ulnar collateral ligament in 1974 allowed the pitcher to return to the major leagues and ultimately transformed sports medicine.

Then John turned toward the fans.

“I will never forget you.”

Eight days later, those words became something else.

John died Saturday at his home in Florida. He was 83. He had been in hospice care.

Baseball lost a pitcher.

Medicine lost one of the human faces of its most influential innovations.

And Yankees fans lost a player who had remained connected to their history for nearly half a century.

The Yankees remembered John as a “bedrock” of their rotation and emphasized that the fame of the surgery bearing his name sometimes overshadowed how accomplished he actually was on the mound.

That point deserves remembering.

John pitched eight seasons for New York across two separate stints.

His first Yankees run began in 1979, when he was already 35 years old and years removed from the operation that supposedly might have ended his career.

He won 21 games that season.

Then he won 22 in 1980.

He reached the World Series with New York in 1981.

Those were not ceremonial years added to the end of a career.

John was still an important major league pitcher.

His longevity eventually became almost absurd.

He debuted in 1963.

He threw his final major league pitch in 1989.

Twenty six seasons.

Seven hundred starts.

More than 4,700 innings.

Two hundred eighty eight victories.

But the numbers explain only part of why John occupied such a peculiar place in baseball history.

His name became medical vocabulary.

When John tore the UCL in his pitching elbow while with the Dodgers in 1974, the injury was widely considered potentially career ending.

Jobe proposed something radical.

He would reconstruct the ligament using a tendon from elsewhere in John’s body.

There was no established roadmap.

There was no long list of successful pitchers John could study.

There was only an experimental procedure and the possibility that baseball might already be over.

John said yes.

He returned in 1976.

Then he kept pitching for another 14 seasons, winning more games after the surgery than before it.

Thousands of athletes would eventually benefit from the medical path that followed.

Yet John’s final Yankees message did not sound like someone trying to remind people of his importance.

It sounded like Tommy John.

Grateful.

Reflective.

Grounded.

Perhaps the most revealing portion came when he remembered advice from his father before leaving home to begin his professional baseball life.

No matter how successful he became, his father told him, he would always simply be Tommy John from Terre Haute, Indiana.

John said he never forgot those words.

That sentiment feels especially appropriate now.

Because fame did something strange to Tommy John.

It turned his name into something millions of people said without necessarily thinking about the man attached to it.

A young pitcher tears his elbow ligament.

Tommy John.

A star begins rehabilitation.

Tommy John.

A prospect loses a season.

Tommy John.

The name became shorthand.

The man sometimes disappeared behind it.

His death gives baseball an opportunity to correct that.

Remember the pitcher who won 288 games.

Remember the Yankees left hander who produced consecutive 20 win seasons in his late 30s.

Remember the 31 year old who accepted an experimental operation when nobody could promise him another major league pitch.

Remember the man whose willingness to try helped change what a devastating elbow injury meant for generations that followed.

And remember the 83 year old who, near the end of his life, was thinking about the people who had watched him.

That is what makes the timing of his Old Timers’ Day message so difficult to process.

Yankee Stadium did not know it was receiving one of Tommy John’s final goodbyes.

Perhaps John understood the moment more clearly.

Either way, the final sentiment now belongs permanently to the relationship between a pitcher and the people who watched him.

He thanked them.

He remembered them.

And eight days later, baseball was left to remember him.